Cine-Drive Scenes

Abstract

The article is a transdisciplinary study of cinema as a medium of thought and truth, love and pleasure, attraction and desire at the intersection of film criticism, media theory, psychoanalysis, and inherent self-analysis with reference to several films. The first scenes of the article trace the origins of the love of cinema, the awakening of desire directed at the movie screen, desire as desire for another. The cinema is a machine of desire, and one of the truths it carries is related to the industrial nature of its production and its technical reproducibility. This truth was sought to be con- veyed by French avant-garde filmmakers such as Able Gance, Jean Epstein, and Ger- maine Dulac. The truth of cinema is in the fiction, which carries the truth within it. And not only the truth about cinema, but also the truth about reality, about the subject. Jacques Lacan’s thesis that truth is structured as fiction is clarified both through the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and through the affinity between the cinematic dis- position and the psychic apparatus. The formula “truth in fiction” gives rise to the peculiarities of cinema thinking as such, cinema thinking as a particular form of thinking. Cinematic thinking is an instrument of cognition. An example of this is Anemic Cinema, Marcel Duchamp’s optical experiment which deconstructs cinema as a medium and shows on the screen exactly how cinema works. The last frame of Duchamp’s film experiment refers to the question of eros, to which the final part of the article is devoted. The analysis of the relationship between love, truth, and ethics is brought to life through the example of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.